The story of a retired crazy who seems to be able to find one adventure after another.

Cambodia was changed for ever when the US invaded in May of 1970. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army had been using Cambodia as a sanctuary while fighting the South Vietnamese and the US Army. The bombing and attacks by the US military gave the Cambodian communists the pretext they needed to rise up against the royal Cambodian government of Prince Sihanouk.

What no one was able to foresee was how different the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communists, were from the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao in Laos. Where the Lao and Vietnamese communists were basically nationalist movement that wanted to take power in their respective countries, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, wanted to create a completely new agrarian, communist country that was cleansed of all traces of the modern world.

The result was the mass extermination of up to 3 million Cambodians. The first to be executed were those who resisted or fought the Khmer Rouge. Then came the professional classes, doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers.

Finally, at the end of the Khmer reign of terror, anyone suspected of any transgression was tortured into a confession and then summarily executed in the most brutal ways imaginable. A trip to Cambodia requires that you visit the areas set aside to remember what Pol Pot and his government did to their own people.

Tony, Pinky, Bruce and I hire a van and head off to a Khmer prison, S21, where the Khmer tortured and murdered Cambodians determined to be enemies of the revolution. S21 was originally a school and is unlikely that the Khmer didn’t recognize the irony of turning a school into a interrogation center that tortured every and extracted a confession from every victim that had the extreme misfortune to enter the facility. Every victim either died at S21 or was sent to the Killing Fields where they were summarily executed. No one escaped. In the end, 21,000 people entered S21. Only 14 survived.

A visit to the Remembrance Center at S21 offers an audio tour with a map of stations to follow as you walk through the buildings. The tour is very much like the remembrance tors in Saigon or Santiago. There are pictures, documents and exhibits of the cells, restraints and instruments of torture.

But what sets this apart from Saigon or Santiago or even the Nazi death camps was the apparent lack of purpose. The Remembrance Center in Saigon shows the brutally of the Vietnam War. The center in Santiago shows the cruelty used to root out “communists and trade unionists.” Even the Nazis had a “goal” for their extermination of the Jews.

But here, the Khmer seemed to do this with no “justifications” at all. They didn’t have the “efficiency” of the Nazis. They have the political motivations of the Pinochet anti-communists. They simply killed for the sake of killing. Anyone who wasn’t a Khmer Rouge might be seized at any time and, once seized, they would be photographed, documented, interrogated and then executed. Being seized was the start of the inevitable path to death.

At the end of the audio tour, we walk out and meet our driver and guide. As if this wasn’t brutal enough the next stop was the Killing Fields some 20 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh proper. This one, Choeung Ek, received the doomed victims from S21 and executed them by bludgeoning usually as soon as they arrived.

Another walking tour with an accompanying audio tour. The excavated graves. The tree where the babies were kill. The racks of skulls. The loudspeaker tree that played martial music to cover the screams of the victims. See this link for a full description, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek . Mentally and emotionally exhausted, we head back to the van and into Phnom Penh to collect our bags and leave for Siem Reap

We’re going to Kampong Cham for the night. It’s only about 125 kms and we’re hoping to make it while it’s still daylight. The road is pretty good and we make good time until we leave Hwy 6 and turn east on to Hwy 7.

We stop just after the turn to check the GPS and we get a few rain drops. Very big raindrops. Within minutes the downpour starts just like a proper monsoon downpour. We huddle under a cover for a small shop and get our rain gear on. When the rain slows we start again only to have the rain get heavier again a few minutes later.

It’s only 46 kms to Kampong Cham but it takes us almost 3 hours to get there. Just as we arrive the rain finally stops and we start looking for a hotel. We finally settle on an old hotel, The Mekong, named for the Mekong River directly across the street.